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Competitive Analysis Technologies has
released "Power Utilities on the Internet" for Q4 2000. It has
2,494 internet web pages and a directory of 16 categories that range from
electrical utilities, gas distribution and power brokers to fuel and power
pricing and publications of interest to power industry personnel. The site
includes 929 electric utility and gas distribution companies worldwide,
719 service and supporting companies, 201 industry associations, 186
worldwide government agencies, 84 publications, and 48 sites with
electricity, coal and gas pricing information. The site is updated every
90 days. You can read the announcement press release at

This site contains buckets of information, a list
of which you can get at http://NCCS.urban.org/product.htm.
The databases include a variety of information from several IRS filings
that nonprofit organizations have to submit; profiles broken down by state
(with information on charitable organizations in that state and their
finances); and fact sheet overviews. The fact sheets contain information
like overviews of tax-exempt organizations registered with the IRS, public
charities and their finances by state, etc.

If
you are clueless about how to make use of all this stuff, be sure to read http://NCCS.urban.org/guide.htm.
And be sure to get the Acrobat reader, too; everything I saw was in PDF
format. It'd be great if more of this material was searchable online, but
it looks like you'll have to dig a little to get to the good stuff here.

Site Offers Statistics on
Children

http://www.childstats.gov/
is the official site of the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family
Statistics, and as such offers a lot of demographics on kids.

The most
comprehensive is America's Kids, which is an overview of the well-being of
America's kids. From the site: "This report presents 23 key
indicators of the well-being of children. These indicators are monitored
through official Federal statistics covering children's economic security,
health, behavior and social environment, and education. The report also
presents data on eight key demographic measures and includes two
indicators as special features: children's knowledge and skills at
kindergarten entry and youth participation in volunteer activities."

The report is huge --
the pdf version is over 110 pages long -- but non PDF highlights are
available at http://www.childstats.gov/ac2000/highlight.asp
. The highlight page provides enough information that you can easily
decide if it's worth it to download the report. If you're only interested
in one segment of the report, check out the menu on the left side of this
page. You can click on topics, and get extensive background information.

Get
Traffic Information on 28 CitiesI'd gotten some enthusiastic
recommendations for TrafficStation, but I was having trouble getting to
it. I kept getting messages about an "internal server error." I
found another URL, though, and now can recommend http://www.trafficstation.com/home/homepage.html
to you.

This page (I think it's
supposed to be framed) gives you the option of choosing one of 28 cities
for an instant traffic report -- from Atlanta to Washington, DC. Choose a
city and you'll be presented with a map of the metro area. The area is
marked based on traffic volume -- green for light, red for heavy,
different marks for events and police -- etc. You can click on a minimap
in the upper right hand corner of the page to change the map coverage.
(Different cities have different options for changing coverage. Phoenix
only has a few options; New York has several.)

You'll notice that there
are tabs at the top of the screen. The first one is Maps; that's what
you're looking at right now. The second one is called Incident Log. That
gives you a list of things that will affect the flow of traffic in the
area you're viewing. (Construction, sporting events, etc.) With some
cities there is a third tab: cameras. This presents you with a map covered
with cameras. Click on a camera to view that portion of the highway.

If you really like this
site, don't forget to check out the personalized traffic information you
can get. This site needs more city information -- 28 isn't all that much
– but there are some cool things here, and it's nicely put together.
Worth a look.

Get LOTS of
Information from that Zip Code

Want to know how much information
you can squeeze out of that zip code? Check out http://zipinfo.com/search/zipcode.htm
for starters. You can enter a zip code and request the county name, time
zone, area code, latitude/longitude, and more.

Now take that zip
code and wander over to http://www.epa.gov/epahome/comm.htm
. Enter in the code and you can get a variety of environmental
information, including a UV forecast, list of EPA regulated facilities in
that zip code, watershed information for that zip code, and more.

Finally, you can get
the distance between two zip codes at http://zipfind.net/.
You can even get a list of all zip codes with x miles radius of a zip
code. For example, I could enter 90210 and get a list of the 157 zip codes
within a ten miles' radius of that zip code.

This obviously only
scratches the surface of the kinds of zip code information you can get
online, but gives you a few places to start looking. There's a lot of
information you can get from those five little numbers!

Have You
Changed Your Clocks Yet?

Did you even have to? If you had to
and didn't, or even if you're just curious about the time in other parts
of the world, check out http://www.worldtimeserver.com.
The site is three frames, two of which are content. The left side is a
list of countries and major regions inside countries. Click on a
country/region on the left side, and the right frame reloads with a map of
the world highlighting the country/region and the current time in that
country/region. There's also a link to allow you to calculate some future
time for the country/region you're viewing.

It
looks like all frames include the GMT as a point of reference. This is a
nice site -- fairly fast loading and with a lot of information. Worth a
look.